Ninja Gaiden 2 Black

I’m now up through Chapter 7 of this game and so far the low points have been the bosses. In Chapter 6, The Aqua Capital, you are traversing through a Venetian city. Big set pieces adorned with classical Italian architecture, canals complete with gondolas, and that ever important staple of Italian history, werewolves! Eventually the tall buildings stop and you end up in the cisterns below the city. These wet tunnels are home to a such an annoying, nuisance of an enemy, the infamous ghost/skeletal piranha. These little bastard will latch on and drag you under the water. They don’t do a lot of damage but are there just to cause trouble (the devs must have gotten a kick out of sicking these things on players because they use them in booby-trapped chests in later levels). So you make your way through these tunnels, you get past the ghost piranhas and end up in this HUGE room full of columns, pedestals, stairs and water. I swam around this place for 20 minutes just exploring all the nooks and crannies, I only found one crystal skull but there were a number of chests. And that’s kind of it! It was this huge room that was just waiting for me to kill a few floating fish in order to trigger a cut scene. What should appear but a HUGE water dragon! To my disappointment, you get locked to this small piece of floating rubble, you can move left to right and a step forward or backwards, but thats it. The dragon attacks you head on and will occasionally throw some ice, fish or water at you. Terribly disappointing to have this entire arena to fight in and you get locked to a square. This entire boss felt like ONE phase of Bayonetta’s huge bosses. I was hoping for a phase shift or to break away from the locked camera but after a few minutes, I had chipped away enough damage to finish it off and the chapter ended.

The next chapter starts you in the same place but parts of the room have crumbled! Basically you can wall jump up to a second story area. Five minutes into this you end up fighting ANOTHER boss, which starts out cool in theory but you can kind of spam the same attack to take it down quickly. A giant bone boss should be fun! But I feel like these bosses are designed to look cool but don’t really offer an acrobatic Ninja a lot of openings to use their best moves. May of the bosses can be chipped away at with the bow and then you just have to slash wildly, hoping you come into contact with whatever part of them is the weak point (the bone boss had a giant glowing orb in his ribcage but you did damage by hitting its head or ankles).

The biggest disappointment so far is the King of the Lycanthropes, a 4-armed monster whom Goro would cower to, challenges you to a fight in the Coliseum! So you chase him there and ‘Finally!’ I’m thinking, ‘a one-on-one boss battle.’ In an earlier chapter you fight Genshin (one of the main antagonists) and he’s a warrior so it’s a tense battle of blocking and dodging.

This lycanthrope was dead quick! Because we got trapped against the ropes and he was doing very little damage but all my attacks were landing. It was a disappointment. I had more strategic fights against a strong werewolf enemy outside the castle. However, this fight did end in literally the coolest way, you grab the bosses giant sickle as the crowd swarms in and attacks. You get to fend them off for a little while until the carnage is interrupted by your big bosomed savior in a hover jet. She picks you up and you literally ride off into the sunset, just incredible work all around.

Oh hey, Rachel’s here. Hey Rachel.

This game can be totally ridiculous. My problem with introducing new characters to play as is they will undoubtedly have a level full of enemies that you’ll have to get used to, and then they will throw a boss or two at you. Rachel is very fun to play as but it tends to ruin your flow, you have to get into a whole new mindset. And while the moves aren’t that different from character to character in this game, their movement style seems to be. Rachel is a hammer user. She’s a little slower to attack and not as swift to dodge or even to activate the block. But for the most part, I was not nearly as annoyed to see her coming in this game vs. the original.

It’s official, I like this game. We’ve been fairly busy the past week so I hadn’t as much time to devote as I’d like, but I dug back in yesterday and today and really enjoyed the levels I played through. I finally got to Ayane’s level and she plays great. Again, who would have thought that this game would be as horny as it is. Chapter 14 had a great section where you are running up a big staircase and lots of Ninjas keep flooding down towards you. When you get to the top you’re greeted with a cutscene where you get to learn a lot more about Elizabet.

The cutscene when she transforms from mostly naked Elizabet, Ruler of Blood is really quick but her character design rules. A hollow torso held together by a gross twisted spine.

She was one of my favorite boss fights so far. Even though she flies (why do all the bosses fly?) you can dodge her and hit her with a combo. Not insanely difficult but it was a good fight. The next section of the game was cool, too. Going back through the torched village, fighting old bosses again and making your way to the base of Mt. Fuji to enter into the realm of the dead, but Genshin isn’t making this easy. It’s time for the next showdown.

Fighting Genshin in a field full of fallen Samurai Swords and molten lava felt straight out of a Kurosawa film (or at the very least Revenge of the Sith). This was a great boss fight too, though once you got his attack timing down it became fairly trivial. I died twice due to not paying attention to my health (they were being stingy with the heals up to this fight) but the third time I only ended up getting hit once.

I must be nearing the end! I feel like the next time I pick up the controller I’ll be getting close to coming head-to-head with the archfiend!

… AND THAT’S CREDITS! The last few chapters of this game get BONKERS and I’m incredibly happy to report they ramp up the difficulty. I finished this last night and took me a few hours to get through some of the repeat bosses. All of our favorites make a comeback; King of the Lycanthropes, The Booby Butterfly Lady, the Hot Lightning Adonis. Its a boss-rush pantheon and seeing as though we’ve traversed into the land of the dead, somehow, at somepoint, it makes sense they are back!

These boss fights were much more challenging. In fact these the swarms of enemies, including these strange, shapely legged, double headed robot ladies caused me to switch up my tactics considerably. If I get swarmed by a group of humanoids I would choose the Kusari-Gama. This doesn’t rank high on the list of best weapons but I was able to memorize some combos that would easily take out a group of 5 or more. If I was dealing with large monsters, Enma’s Fang would be my choice. There are some aerial combos that get you above the crowd and let you deal some heavy damage.

But as you move through the story, your Dragon Sword gets one final upgrade (The TRUE DRAGON SWORD!) PLUS you can dual wield it with … THE SWORD OF THE ARCHFIEND! That’s right, you get two sword upgrades! Certainly whatever is waiting at the end of these disgusting levels could ONLY be killed with my magic power swords, right? Can you guess where this is going?

To me, if you spend all this time setting up the importance of these swords, and the entire lineage of the Dragon Clan has relied on the power of the one true Dragon Sword to keep evil at bay, why would you center the boss battle around THE BOW AND ARROW?! A weapon that is largely powerless? At this point I just assume that they wanted to make these battles as far away from Zelda-type 8-hits and done as possible. The saving grace here is that the Arch-Fiend is fucking awesome, straight out of a Gwar video.

It’s a tedious fight that goes:

• shoot head with arrow
• shoot belly with arrow
• find new chasm in wall and wall-jump up towards the fleeing archfiend

Luckily there is a second part to this fight that makes the Arch-Fiend more of one-on-one opponent. Even though I’m being hypercritical of the ending, it was pretty great. There’s lots of impressive set pieces and action, the pacing is great moving from one boss or waves of enemies after another, it was extremely cool. The coolest thing I think is the very end, Ryu kneels in that same field of fallen samurai swords to pray, stand up and starts a slow motion walk across the field. Boom, credits. The credits keep rolling and end with him across the field where it resumes normal speed and hits us with one last cut-scene.

For all of the misgivings the boss battles bring, it really is a great game. Those negatives are far from deal breakers and are mostly there because otherwise it would be all gloating about how sick the weapons and combat system are. I liked the depth of the bench of enemies as well. It’s a game that makes me want to play the others in the series, or at least go back to the first and give it another shake.